Program Notes: Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony with Christopher Dragon
CLASSICS 2024/25
SAINT-SAËNS ORGAN SYMPHONY
WITH CHRISTOPHER DRAGON
PERFORMED BY YOUR COLORADO SYMPHONY
CHRISTOPHER DRAGON, conductor
TIME FOR THREE
RANAAN MEYER, double bass
NICK KENDALL, violin
CHARLES YANG, violin
Friday, November 22, 2024 at 7:30pm
Saturday, November 23, 2024 at 7:30pm
Sunday, November 24, 2024 at 1:00pm
Boettcher Concert Hall
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS The Wasps: Overture
KEVIN PUTS
SAINT-SAËNS
Contact
I. The Call
II. Codes. Scherzo
III. Contact
IV. Convivium
— Intermission —
Symphony No. 3 in C minor, Op. 78, “Organ”
PART I. Adagio – Allegro moderato Poco adagio
PART II. Allegro moderato – Presto Maestoso - Allegro
CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 36 MINUTES INCLUDING A 20 MINUTE INTERMISSION.
The custom Allen Digital Computer Organ is provided by Mervine Music, LLC.
Saturday’S concert iS SponSored by Laurie and ed bock Sunday’S concert iS dedicated in memory of bette macdonaLd
PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY
CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES
CHRISTOPHER DRAGON, conductor
Australian conductor Christopher Dragon is the Music Director of the Wyoming Symphony Orchestra, newly appointed Music Director of the Greensboro Symphony and is the Resident Conductor of the Colorado Symphony. He joined the Colorado Symphony in the 2015/2016 Season as Associate Conductor – a position he held for four years. For three years prior, Dragon held the inaugural position of Assistant Conductor with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, which gave him the opportunity to work closely with Principal Conductor Asher Fisch.
Dragon has a versatile portfolio ranging from live-to-picture performances including Nightmare Before Christmas, Toy Story and Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, a wide variety of collaborations with artists such as the Wu-Tang Clan, Cynthia Erivo and Joshua Bell, to standard and contemporary orchestral repertoire such as Danny Elfman’s Percussion Concerto; all areas of which he has become highly sought after. Christopher has become known for his charisma, high energy and affinity for a good costume, consistently delivering unforgettable performances that has made him an audience favourite.
Recent highlights include his debut with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center, his German debut with the WDR Funkhausorchester, performances of Danny Elfman’s Music from the Films of Tim Burton with Danny Elfman reprising the role of Jack Skellington and historic performances with Nathaniel Rateliff at Walt Disney Concert Hall and David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center. Upcoming debuts include the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Nasvhille Symphony and the LA Philharmonic.
Christopher is highly sought after as a guest conductor and has worked with the San Francisco Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra, Utah Symphony, Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, San Diego Symphony, Pacific Symphony, Omaha Symphony, Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, Chicago Philharmonic, Modesto Symphony Orchestra, Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Orquestra Sinfônica de Porto Alegre and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. In Australia, he has guest conducted the Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and West Australian Symphony Orchestras. His 2015 debut performance at the Sydney Opera House with John Pyke and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra was released on album by ABC Music and won an ARIA the following year.
He has also conducted at numerous festivals including the Breckenridge and Bangalow Music Festivals, with both resulting in immediate re-invitations. At the beginning of 2016 Dragon conducted Wynton Marsalis’ Swing Symphony as part of the Perth International Art Festival alongside Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.
Christopher began his conducting studies in 2011 and was a member of the prestigious Symphony Services International Conductor Development Program in Australia under the guidance of course director Christopher Seaman. He has also studied with numerous distinguished conductors including Leonid Grin, Paavo and Neeme Jarvi at the Jarvi Summer Festival, Fabio Luisi at the Pacific Music Festival and conducting pedagogue Jorma Panula.
CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES
TIME FOR THREE
RANAAN MEYER, double bass
NICK KENDALL, violin
CHARLES YANG, violin
GRAMMY and Emmy-winning ensemble, Time For Three (TF3), defies convention and boundaries by showcasing excellence across different genres, including classical music, Americana, and singer-songwriter. Their unique sound captivates audiences, immersing them in a musical experience that merges various eras, styles, and traditions of Western music. TF3, consisting of Charles Yang (violin, vocals), Nicolas “Nick” Kendall (violin, vocals), and Ranaan Meyer (double bass, vocals), combines their instruments and voices in a remarkable sound, establishing a distinct voice of expression that resonates with listeners worldwide.
TF3’s longstanding history of collaboration with contemporary classical composers continues to thrive. They have worked closely with esteemed artists such as Chris Brubeck and Pulitzer Prize winners William Bolcom and Jennifer Higdon. Their most recent commission, Contact, composed by Pulitzer Prize winner Kevin Puts, premiered with the San Francisco Symphony and The Philadelphia Orchestra in the summer of 2022. This extraordinary piece, alongside Jennifer Higdon’s Concerto 4-3, was released on Deutsche Grammophon under the album title Letters for the Future. Conducted by Xian Zhang, the album’s exceptional quality propelled it onto the Billboard top 10 Classical Recordings charts. Additionally, it garnered a nomination for an Opus Klassik award and received a GRAMMY win in the Best Classical Instrumental Solo category.
Renowned for their charismatic and energetic performances, TF3 has garnered praise from respected outlets including NPR, NBC, The Wall Street Journal, and the Chicago Sun-Times. They have graced illustrious stages such as Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, and The Royal Albert Hall, effortlessly adapting their inimitable and versatile style to intimate venues like Joe’s Pub in New York or Yoshi’s in San Francisco. TF3 was featured on the acclaimed “Night of the Proms” tour, sharing stages with renowned artists like Chaka Khan and Ronan Keating across several European countries. Their collaborations span a diverse range of artists, including Ben Folds, Branford Marsalis, Joshua Bell, Aoife O’Donovan, Natasha Bedingfield, and Arlo Guthrie.
TF3’s exceptional talents have not only earned them a GRAMMY win but also secured them an Emmy for their concert special, “Time For Three In Concert,” produced by PBS. Their appetite for new experiences led them to collaborate with cellist and composer Ben Sollee, creating the soundtrack for Focus Features’ film Land, directed by Robin Wright. Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2021. TF3 has teamed up with GRAMMY-winning songwriter Liz Rose and GRAMMY-winning producer Femke Weidema for new recordings released through Warner Music. They have also contributed to Summer Walker’s R&B hit, Constant Bullsxxt, showcasing their versatility across genres.
Time For Three’s artistic achievements, fueled by their relentless pursuit of musical excellence, have solidified their status as a remarkable ensemble. Their GRAMMY win and extraordinary collaborations speak to their unwavering dedication to pushing creative boundaries and captivating audiences with their exceptional talent.
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS (1872-1958)
Overture to Aristophanes’ Comedy The Wasps
Ralph Vaughan Williams was born October 12, 1872 in Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, and died August 26, 1958 in London. He composed this Overture and additional incidental music for a production of Aristophanes’ play in Cambridge on November 15, 1909; Charles Wood conducted. The score calls for woodwinds in pairs plus piccolo, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, percussion, harp and strings. Duration is about 10 minutes. This piece was last performed by the orchestra May 22-24, 2015, with Andrew Litton conducting.
There had been a long tradition at both Cambridge and Oxford of presenting plays by the Greek dramatists in English with no attempt to recreate the ancient staging. “These productions are always backed by classical scholarship,” wrote Frank Howes, “but they are infused with the spirit of amateur theatricals.” For a production of Aristophanes’ comedy The Wasps in 1909 at Cambridge University, his alma mater, Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote an overture as well as seventeen items of incidental music. In The Wasps, Aristophanes, an affluent aristocrat who hated the democratic leveling of Greek society, hurled his satiric barbs at the Athenian passion for litigation. Day after day, Greek men would flock to the trials to form a jury while neglecting their personal affairs. The Wasps tells of one such man, Philocleon, who abandons his family every day to serve as a juryman. His son, Bdelycleon, locks him in the house, which is unsuccessfully stormed by Philocleon’s fellow jurymates, costumed in the ancient productions, according to the text, as a “chorus of wasps ... whose acrimonious, stinging, exasperated temper is meant to typify the character fostered among Athenian citizens by excessive addiction to forensic business.” To calm his father’s distress at being denied his jury duty, Bdelycleon stages a mock trial at home for him. In a travesty of the Athenian system of justice, the family dog is arraigned for stealing a piece of cheese but acquitted on a technicality. Vaughan Williams’ Overture to The Wasps captures the bright spirits and sharp wit of Aristophanes’ comedy.
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES
KEVIN PUTS (b. 1972)
Contact, Concerto for Two Violins, Double Bass and Orchestra
Kevin Puts was born January 3, 1972 in St. Louis. He composed Contact in 2020-2022 for Time for Three, who premiered it on March 26, 2022 in St. Petersburg with the Florida Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Black. The score calls for triple woodwinds, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, piano and strings. Duration is about 30 minutes. This is the Colorado Symphony premiere performance of this piece.
Kevin Puts, born in 1972 in St. Louis, received his bachelor’s degree from the Eastman School of Music (1994), his master’s degree from Yale (1996), and his doctorate from Eastman (1999); his composition teachers have included Jacob Druckman, Joseph Schwantner, Christopher Rouse, Samuel Adler and David Burge. He also participated in the 1996 Tanglewood Festival Fellowship Program, where he worked with Bernard Rands and William Bolcom. Puts taught at the University of Texas at Austin from 1999 until 2006, when he joined the faculty of the Peabody Institute in Baltimore. Kevin Puts has accumulated an impressive array of distinctions: the Pulitzer Prize for his acclaimed opera Silent Night, based on the 2005 French film Joyeux Nöel and premiered by Minnesota Opera in November 2012; from 1996 to 1999, he served concurrently as Composer-in-Residence with the California Symphony (which premiered three of his works) and Young Concert Artists, Inc. in New York; he has received commissions from noted ensembles and organizations across the country; he was the first undergraduate to be awarded the Charles Ives Scholarship by the American Academy of Arts and Letters; he has received grants and fellowships from BMI, ASCAP, Tanglewood, Hanson Institute for American Music, Guggenheim Foundation and numerous others. His most recent opera is an adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, co-commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and Philadelphia Orchestra, and starring Renée Fleming, Joyce DiDonato and Kelli O’Hara. The Hours was first performed in concert in Philadelphia in March 2022, and had its stage premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in November 2022.
Puts wrote of the GRAMMY Award-winning Contact, jointly commissioned by the Colorado Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, Sun Valley Music Festival Orchestra, Spokane Symphony, and Florida Orchestra, “In April 2017, I first heard a live performance by the prodigiously gifted string trio Time for Three at Joe’s Pub in New York City. The group — violinists Nick Kendall and Charles Yang and bassist Ranaan Meyer — had contacted me about the possibility of my writing them a concerto, and after hearing them play, sing, improvise and perform their own arrangements and compositions that evening, I felt both elated — by the infectious energy and joy they exude as performers — and also rather daunted by the thought. It seemed our musical tastes were so similar that I suggested to them, not at all facetiously, ‘Maybe you ought to write your own concerto!’ I simply couldn’t imagine conceiving any music they couldn’t improvise themselves.
“One of the tunes the trio performed that night at Joe’s Pub was an original, called Vertigo, which the guys later told me they wrote in a hotel room on the road. In the song, all three members both play their instruments and sing. I wondered about the possibility of beginning the concerto with the trio singing a wordless refrain a cappella. I wrote a chord progression that unfolds from a single note and progresses through simple, suspended harmonies. Orchestral
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES
winds respond with the same music while the trio adds decorative, improvisatory gestures. This idea, first heard in a reflective manner, grows considerably until the orchestral brass deliver a most emphatic version of it. This first movement (The Call) ends with the same sense of questioning with which it began.
“Threatening unisons, played by the entire orchestra, break the mood startlingly and impel the soloists, who drive forward with syncopated rhythms and virtuoso flurries of arpeggios. The energy in this second movement (Codes) is unrelenting, often drawing its harmonic flavor from the ladder of notes that forms the ‘overtone’ series [i.e., the purely acoustic, widely spaced notes available, for example, on a keyless bugle] and by combining triads from disparate keys.
“By yet another contrast, the orchestral music that opens the third movement (Contact) is cold and stark. I had the image of an abandoned vessel floating inert in the recesses of space. The soloists interrupt this with a quiet, gently rolling meditation, eventually inviting a solo oboe and solo clarinet to join in lyrical counterpoint high above. Eventually, the soloists recall the stark opening of the movement, rendering its rhythms into an unaccompanied phrase of tenderness and longing.
“I began Contact in early 2020, and, to put it mildly, the search for a silver lining amid the Covid-19 pandemic was a unique challenge. But the cancellation of the initial performances of Contact scheduled for the summer of 2020 allowed us to continue working together on the concerto long after I finished drafting it. Though my original title was simply ‘Triple Concerto,’ we all agreed there was something more than abstract musical expression going on, that there was a story being told. Could the refrain at the opening of the concerto be a message sent into space, a call to intelligent life across the vast distances containing clues to our DNA, to our very nature as Earth people? Could the Morse Code-like rhythms of the scherzo suggest radio transmissions, wave signals, etc.? And might the third movement (originally called simply ‘Ballad’) represent the moment of contact itself? (Admittedly, the climax of the film adaptation of Carl Sagan’s Contact, at which point Ellie, played by the wonderful Jodie Foster, en route via a wormhole to an alien civilization, witnesses a radiant cosmic event to which she tearfully breathes, ‘No words … they should have sent a poet … no words ...’ was in my mind during these discussions.)
“Still in search of a finale for the concerto, I was serendipitously introduced to the wonderful Gankino Horo (‘Ganka’s Dance’), a traditional Bulgarian melody, blazingly performed by at least twelve young cellists in unison at my (then) ten-year-old son Ben’s studio cello recital. At home, I began playing it on the piano and gradually my own compositional voice crept in. I was reminded of Bartók’s haunting Romanian Folk Dances and that composer’s fusion of his own musical sensibilities with age-old folk melodies. And so I set about composing a sort of fantasy on this tune [Convivium — genial, affable, festive; from Latin for ‘a feast’], its asymmetric rhythmic qualities a fitting counterbalance to the previous three movements.
“The word ‘contact’ gained new resonance during those years of pandemic isolation. It is my hope that this concerto might be heard as an expression of yearning for this fundamental human need. I am deeply grateful to Time for Three for their belief in my work and for the tireless collaborative spirit that allowed us to develop this showcase for their immense talents.”
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES
CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS (1835-1921)
Symphony No. 3 in C minor, Op. 78, “Organ”
Camille Saint-Saëns was born October 9, 1835 in Paris, and died December 16, 1921 in Algiers. He composed his Third Symphony in 1886 and conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra in its premiere on May 19, 1886. The score calls for piccolo, three flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, organ, piano (four hands) and strings. Duration is about 36 minutes.
The Paris in which Saint-Saëns grew up, studied and lived was enamored of the vacuous stage works of Meyerbeer, Offenbach and a host of lesser lights in which little attention was given to artistic merit, only to convention and entertainment. Berlioz tried to break this stranglehold of mediocrity, and he earned for himself a reputation as an eccentric, albeit a talented one, whose works were thought unperformable, and probably best left to the pedantic Germans anyway. Saint-Saëns, with his love of Palestrina, Rameau, Beethoven, Liszt and, above all, Mozart, also determined not to be enticed into the Opéra Comique but to follow his calling toward a more noble art. To this end, he established with some like-minded colleagues the Société Nationale de Musique in 1871 to perform serious concert works of French composers. The venture was a success, and it did much to give a renewed sense of artistic purpose to the best French musicians.
Saint-Saëns produced a great deal of music to promote the ideals of the Société Nationale de Musique, including ten concertos and various smaller works for solo instruments and orchestra, four tone poems, two orchestral suites and five symphonies, the second and third of which were unpublished for decades and discounted in the usual numbering of these works. The last of the symphonies, No. 3 in C minor, is his masterwork in the genre. Saint-Saëns pondered the work for a long time, and realized it with great care. “I have given in this Symphony,” he confessed, “everything that I could give.”
Of the work’s construction, Saint-Saëns wrote, “This Symphony is divided into two parts, though it includes practically the traditional four movements. The first, checked in development, serves as an introduction to the Adagio. In the same manner, the scherzo is connected with the finale.” Saint-Saëns clarified the division of the two parts by using the organ only in the second half of each: dark and rich in Part I, noble and uplifting in Part II. The entire work is unified by transformations of the main theme, heard in the strings at the beginning after a brief and mysterious introduction. In his “Organ” Symphony, Saint-Saëns combined the techniques of thematic transformation, elision of movements, and richness of orchestration with a clarity of thought and grandeur of vision to create one of the masterpieces of French symphonic music.
